Lost Boy: Refugee starts over as 7’2″ star of university basketball team

Antigonish, N.S. — Antigonish is a university town, a small one, with tidy red brick buildings and cozy wooden houses with “welcome” mats on the front porch.

It is a town where Main Street is the main street, with a Henry’s barbershop, an Andy’s Tire, a Keltic Ford, the Prissy Pig restaurant and not much else.

Out beyond Main Street, past a construction site, past the hospital, past rolling green fields that catch and cradle the soft glow of an autumn sun, are beaches and the Atlantic Ocean.

Riiny Ngot, a second-year sociology student at St. Francis Xavier University, the liberal arts school at the heart of the tiny town, has been to the beach twice. Each visit is the same.

Mr. Ngot stares at the waves. Listens to them roll in, and then he waits. Waits to see if the bad memories will come back.

And they always do. For Riiny Ngot, the ocean off the coast of Nova Scotia becomes an African river swollen by the rainy season, running red with blood.

The gentle Atlantic waves turn into crocodiles and the boiling surf becomes the tortured cries of children being drowned, dragged under and torn apart by man-eaters.

Hundreds died that day in the Gilo River on the border between Sudan and Ethiopia. It was the final, deadly frontier in a mass exodus involving thousands of Sudanese children desperate to escape a bloody civil war. Beyond the river was Ethiopia, and beyond that the sprawling sanctuary of a United Nations refugee camp in Kenya.

Mr. Ngot swam to safety with his sister strapped to his back. He was 11. His best friend did not survive. Twelve years later, and a world away, he is still haunted by his friend’s cries when he stands by the ocean.

“After the attack on my village I lost the part of me that loved nature,” he says. “It is a big part of me to be missing — to be able to swim in a river — or in the ocean. And the woods are still scary for me.

“Instead of just seeing what is there, seeing that a stick is just a stick, I see the memories. I see a different picture in my mind.”

Telling his story is something Mr. Ngot wants to do — needs to do — to honour a dead friend and all the others who did not make it.

But it is not easy.

Being a Lost Boy, a member of a lonely tribe of Sudanese children orphaned or separated from their parents during a conflict that killed millions and subjected the young to horrors no child should ever see, never will be easy.

The nightmares recede, but they don’t go away. Summoning them to the surface is emotionally exhausting, and can leave Mr. Ngot feeling depressed.

Depressed. It is hard to imagine, especially after meeting Mr. Ngot. He smiles shyly, at first. Then he smiles all the time. He asks a reporter if maybe, perhaps, just this once, it would be OK not to talk about the bad things?

If maybe, perhaps, just this once, his guest could tell the story of where he is now, in a town near nowhere Nova Scotia, playing basketball for a tiny university that has ambitions of winning a national championship?

He isn’t 11 anymore, you see. And he is not lost — but found — a 23-year-old man with a head full of dreams and a fractured past, whose pieces are gradually pulling together again.

“It’s hard for me to talk about the past,” Mr. Ngot says. Besides, he says, with his eyes wide, dancing, the story hasn’t stood still.

“This is Riiny,” he says, in a soft voice. “This is Riiny now, all grown up.”

And this is Riiny’s basement apartment on Fairview Street, a short walk from campus. It is a short apartment, too, a potentially lethal living situation for the tenant, who measures 7-foot-2.

Mr. Ngot is a human eclipse, with shoes the size of Cadillacs, spindly ankles and twiggy legs that go up, and up, and never seem to end. Until they do in a face that, despite all the horrors it has seen, is open and welcoming.

“It is good that I don’t really drink,” Mr. Ngot says, ducking to answer his front door and ducking again to enter a sparsely decorated bedroom.

There is a bed, a light he sleeps with at night to keep the bad dreams at bay, and two pieces of paper tacked to the wall. One is an ode to basketball he wrote, about friendship, competition and always being himself. The other is a drawing of a cow. A cow. He sketched it during a team-building exercise in which the X-Men were asked to list their strengths in a format they were comfortable with.

“Cows are a symbol of everything for the Dinka man,” the artist says. “Since I was young I would take cows to the fields for grassing, and you have to be brave taking them to the field. With basketball, I have to be brave and do everything with courage. You have to be a warrior.”

The drawing, the nightlight by his bed and the scars that etch his legs and forearms are visible reminders that Mr. Ngot is not like the rest of his teammates. That no matter what they have seen, he has seen far worse.

He spent four years in a refugee camp before an aunt found him and his sister through the Internet and an uncle brought them to Canada to live in Calgary. He spent four years thinking his parents were dead.

His first winter coat had sleeves that stopped at the elbows. It was not until he was in this cold land, halfway around the world from his African home, that he learned that his parents, mother Yar and father Mayout Riiny, had survived the war.

In June, Mr. Ngot was reunited with his mother and father for the first time in 12 years. Kampala, Uganda, Yar’s adopted home, was the initial stop. He was happy, and nervous on the flight. His mind was swimming with questions: What would she look like? Would she be proud of the man he had become? How would he fit into a family that had been ripped apart so many years before?

Mother and son hugged at the airport. They could not speak. Neither could find the words. Over the next week they walked together, and the stories tumbled out. Mr. Ngot told Yar how he never forgot the lesson she taught him: that “home is where the heart is.”

Yar cooked traditional Sudanese soups, full of beef and chicken. They did not talk about the war. The scars were obvious. Soldiers hacked off his mother’s right thumb and slashed her Achilles’ tendon. She walks with a limp.

“This was something I struggled with when I first saw my Mom because I pictured the pain she must have gone through,” Mr. Ngot says. “I just kept staring at her hand.”

She told her son it was part of war. That she could still walk, talk, and that it was still her — his mother — sitting across from him and getting to know the child she once thought she had lost for good.

The reunion tour’s next stop was Juba, the capital of southern Sudan. Then it was on to Mr. Ngot’s ancestral village.

“Who am I in this airport,” the traveller wrote in his journal, while the plane prepared to leave Kampala. “I was lost. Now I am in a plane sitting next to my mother. I don’t know what Dad might say or what Dad might look like now. My mother, she glanced at me two or three times.

“I don’t know what she is thinking. But I have never seen her so happy. Whatever piece I lost, is back together.”

Mr. Ngot resembles his father, only six inches taller. They embraced when they met and talked a while, before the old man asked if he wanted to go for a run. Mayout Riiny is a curiosity in the Dinka tribe, a recreational jogger in a culture that does not jog. So father and son ran. Mr. Ngot kept on running.

“One old man in our village stopped me and asked if I was the son of Mayout Riiny — and if I had the same disease as him,” Mr. Ngot says, laughing.

There were hard days. Walking through the village where he spent his summers, where the life he knew changed for good, brought back memories, both happy and horrific. Mr. Ngot could look left and see his childhood innocence, out there herding cows, racing through fields with his buddies, telling stories and having spear-throwing contests.

And he could look right and hear the thump of the helicopter gunships, the screams and the explosions. See the spot where another good friend, Deng, was burned to death with his family, and see his own house, where he had kicked down a door engulfed by flames to save his little sister.

Mr. Ngot’s family was wealthy. His grandfather was the chief. He was raised in Wau, a large town, with every luxury a boy could ever want. He says he was arrogant, lazy, a bad student, a spoiled kid who just wanted to watch cartoons and that the horrors he experienced changed him. And, in a way, may have saved him.

“I would have been a different kind of person,” Mr. Ngot says. “I don’t know what that person would have been, but I don’t think I would have been a nice person.”

He shrugs. He is wearing a yellow golf shirt, a blue hoodie and warm-up pants. He is sitting in the campus cafeteria munching on the second of two egg salad sandwiches.

Steve Konchalski, the school’s basketball coach, happens past, says hello, and tells Mr. Ngot he will see him at practice later. The big man has work to do. The season starts on Sunday. Basketball does not come naturally to Mr. Ngot. But there is an old coach’s saying: You can’t teach height.

Coach Konchalski, a legend in Canadian university circles, was drawn to Mr. Ngot’s story. He sold him on the idea of coming to a small town where nobody can get lost, where the old scars could continue to heal.

The coach regularly receives phone calls from schools across the province requesting that Mr. Ngot come and share his story with students.

“I feel like his booking agent,” he says.

Talking about his past allows the Lost Boy to put a little money aside, which he sends home to his mother. After each talk Mr. Ngot gets home, takes a deep breath and a good long look in the mirror.

“I look in the mirror and I see my beautiful soul and I forgive, I forgive myself for this horrible life. And I realize that maybe that it is my purpose,” he says. “Maybe it is the reason I survived: so I could tell this story.”

He has another year left of school. He is a solid “B” student. He speaks five languages. He is determined to get his degree. After that, who knows? He would like to play professional basketball, maybe in Europe, maybe somewhere else. After all, you can’t teach height.

Mr. Ngot dreams of helping people in a life after basketball, working for the United Nations or a human rights organization to build something good, such as a school or new houses in the village where the nightmare began.

This is Riiny now, all grown up.

Squinting into the late October sun, he flashes the peace sign to a departing guest. Then again, it could be a “V”— for victory.

Turning to go, he begins the long, deliberate climb up the library steps. His journey is not over yet.

It has only just begun.

“I am going to enjoy my life,” Mr. Ngot says. “I am not going to let this sad life I had in the past prevent me from living.

“Now that I have my family the piece I lost is back together again. And I am going to hold my head up high, work hard, enjoy what I do — and never look back.

“I am still Riiny. I will always be Riiny, and nothing can ever take that away.”